EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes II was on USA Up All Night on July 5, 1996.
Don’t worry if you never saw Bedroom Eyes. This Chuck Vincent-directed film has nothing to do with it. Yes, the characters have the same names, but it’s all different actors. This insane film can really stand on its own, as it combines a Cinemax After Dark film with a giallo. If I’ve learned anything from the movies of Mr. Vincent, it’s that you have no idea where they’re going.
Harry Ross (Wings Hauser) lives in a world of little to no morals. His business partner gets an inside trading tip that could make them rich from one of his friends with benefits. But when it comes to love, his life is an even bigger mess.
Let me see if I can summarize it for you: His ex-wife JoBeth (adult film star and Vincent’s favorite actress Veronica Hart) tried to kill Harry five years ago and went to prison. Meanwhile, his wife Carolyn (Kathy Shower, Playboy Playmate of the Year 1986) has been all messed up since Harry broke up with one of his girlfriends, Alexandria, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident the very same night that Harry broke up with her.
Things get worse when Harry catches his wife aardvarking with Matthew, a hip young artist. To fix things, our hero, such as it is, decides to get horizontal with Sophie (B,r), an artist. He promises her that his wife can make her famous, but he soon falls for her.
Somehow, Sophie is Alexandria’s sister, there’s some murder, and there’s plenty of fishing for kippers. Moistening the Pope. Punching the cow. You know what I mean — sweet, sweet lovemaking. Even after Harry gets stabbed multiple times, he is still able to play some slophockey.
Linda Blair has brought me down many dark corridors. This is one of them, a movie that takes Wings Hauser through hell and finally jumping across rooftops and beating up cops. That’s what happens when you go in too deep.
Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”
Where else could Weird Al go after several albums and music videos? To the far end of the TV dial lies this film, in which he plays George Newman, who takes over Channel 62. When he’s mistreated by the boss of Channel 8, R.J. Fletcher (Kevin McCarthy), he decides to lead his station — which is mostly reruns that everyone has already seen — to success.
Soon, the janitor (Michael Richards) is hosting Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse, and the ratings are great. Except that George’s gambling uncle (Stanley Brock) and the owner of the station, well, he owes money to his bookie, and they’re about to lose the station. Fran Drescher, Victoria Jackson, Anthony Geary (as an alien!), Billy Barty, John Paragon, Belinda Bauer, Dr. Demento, Emo Philips and many more appear.
But these are just simple descriptions of this movie. The joy is in watching it, a movie that has TV shows in it like Wheel of Fish and Raul’s Wild Kingdom. That has Weird Al become Rambo. Spatula City — “I liked the spatulas so much, I bought the company.” — and a car salesman who says, “I’ll club a seal to make a better deal.” You can see the station’s line-up in one scene. They are — including the ones I already mentioned — Beastiality Today, Beat the Loan Shark, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bowling for Burgers, Buddha Knows Best, Dog Racing from Rio de Janeiro, Druids on Parade, Eye On Toxic Waste, Fun with Dirt, Leave it to Bigfoot, Mr. Ed, My Three Mutants, Name that Stain, News, That’s Disgusting, The Flying Pope, The Lice is Right, The Young and the Dyslexic, Town Talk,Traffic Court,Secrets of the Universe, Underwater Bingo for Teens, Strip Solitaire, Volcano Worshippers Hour, Wide World of Tractor Pulls, Wonderful World of Phlegm and You Bet Your Pink Slip.
Anyways, you either get it or you don’t. I do, I hope you do, let’s talk about it in the comments. Ghandi II? Conan the Librarian?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bedroom Eyes was on USA Up All Night on January 6, 1996 and February 1 and September 27, 1997.
If you enjoy Canadian horror, then you know who William Fruet is, the maker of Death Weekend (released here as The House By the Lake), Cries In the Night (better known as Funeral Home), redneck rampage film Trapped(AKA Baker County U.S.A.), Spasmsand the kinda-sorta Alien by way of animal experimentation oddity Blue Monkey.
This time, he’s taking on the genre of adult thriller, which by 1984 is kind of what giallo was leaning toward and then would completely become in the wake of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. The ideas are the same — identity, secrets, sex, shame, violence — but it’s missing the great music and the fashion for the most part.
If you’re nostalgic for a film that aired on USA Up All Night, this movie is for you. This is the type of universe where a peeping tom is the hero, where a psychologist can see past his perversion — or encourage it — to see the man he is inside and where every other woman is evil.
This was, of course, followed by Bedroom Eyes II, which is way better because it has Wings Hauser, Veronica Hart and Linda Blair in the cast, as well as Chuck Vincent directing, and that movie also has no compunctions about feeling sweaty and filthy, while this one seems clean and wrapped up, like some of the 80s felt.
This one does get points for having its female antagonist repeatedly beat the protagonist up, including a slapstick bonk at the end as the police take her away.
Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems that the same imagination that helps her write is also driving her to madness. Her husband takes her moving all the way to madness, to Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.
Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church, and yes, that same werewolf leaps through the flames.
Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.
That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film, Clive Turner, was originally going to direct, but when the financiers pulled out, he had to get Hough on board.
That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him, as well as additional pages of the script, while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.
Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.
You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling III was on USA Up All Night on January 19, 1991 and March 6, 1998.
This is the last Howling movie to play in U.S. theaters. Gary Brandner, author of the Howling novels, approved director Philippe Mora’s purchase of the rights to his novels. The credits even claim that this is based on his book The Howling III: Echoes. However, in truth, it has a different setting and primarily features werewolves as sympathetic characters.
Professor Harry Beckmeyer is an Australian anthropologist who has found footage of aborigines sacrificing a deer in 19Aboriginal people. Hearing that a wolf-like wolf has killed a man in Siberia, he tries — and fails — to warn the President of the U.S. about the potential of lycan assaults.
Meanwhile, an abused girl who just might so happen to be a werewolf is running away from home. Her name is Jerboa, and after meeting a young American named Donny Martin, she gets a role in the horror film, Shape Shifters Part 8. She gets into horror movies, and after watching a werewolf film with Donny, she reveals that transformations don’t happen that way. He asks her how she knows, she goes full furry beast, and he responds as we all would, by engaging her in some interspecies aardvarking.
As the movie wraps, strobe lights cause Jerboa to transform. She runs into the night and is hit by a car. When the doctors try to save her, they notice that she is with child and has a marsupial-like pouch on her belly. Holy cow, this movie! I can’t believe that I watched that, much less typed it out for you to read.
There’s also a Russian ballerina that happens to be a werewolf, because I guess if you bark at the moon you have a re,allsuppose,derful artistic abilitie,s as a secondary mutation.
Suffice to say that you should stick with this movie, if only to see Dame Edna out of drag as Barry Humphries and a pack of werewolves go wild at the cheapest looking Academy Awards outside of The Lonely Lady.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling IIwas on USA Up All Night on April 23, 1994, April 13, 1996 and March 28, 1997.
Even though Gary Brandner, author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay to this movie, it has nothing to do with his 1979 novel The Howling II, much less the original The Howling. It tries, but this movie is just too weird to fully close the loop.
There’s never been another werewolf movie like this one. Whether that is positive or negative all depends on how much you like werewolves having sex.
Ben White (Reb Brown, who is in a little movie called Yor Hunter from the Future that I could tell you about for many days) is dealing with the death of his sister Karen White, who just so happens to be the heroine of the first of these movies. He joins up with Jenny (Annie McEnroe, who was in Snowbeast and Battletruck) and the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee, who apologized to Joe Dante for making this movie) to battle werewolves.
This brings them on a journey to Transylvania and a battle against Stirba (Sybil Danning!), the queen of the werewolves, who is joined by Mariana (Marsha Hunt, who the song “Brown Sugar” is about) and Erle (Ferdy Mayne, who is in another film I can discuss for days and days, Night Train to Terror).
What follows is complete lunacy: werewolf witchcraft, lycan orgies, Sybil Danning repeatedly ripping off her top (the same shot repeated again and again to no complaint), dwarves, priests being killed and punk rock from the band Babel.
Director Philippe Mora actually made some pretty good films, like Mad Dog Morgan, The Beast Within and The Return of Captain Invincible. I’m insane and love this movie, so I will include it in my list of his good ones.
Finally, let’s talk about another subject I can hold court on: Christopher Lee. Mora didn’t know that Sir Lee was a war hero in Czechoslovakia, where this was filmed. Actually, no one did, because he wasn’t allowed to talk about his intelligence work during World War II. When he showed up for filming, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, as he had killed a top Nazi official named Reinhard Heydrich. In fact, before he became an actor, Lee remained a Nazi hunter for several years.
I also love that this movie was sent the wrong costumes by 20th Century Fox. Instead of wolf suits, they were sent the monkey suits from Planet of the Apes. Lee tried to help fix this by ad-libbing, “The process of evolution is reversed.”
Want to know more about The Howling movies? Check out this article.
Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”
Directed by Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt (This Is Elvis) and written by Dana Olsen (The ‘Burbs, Wacko, Going Berserk), It Came from Hollywood came along at a significant time for me. I’d been watching SNL and SCTV, so seeing so many of my favorite comedy people in one film — Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech and Chong, and Gilda Radner — all in one movie was a huge deal to me. I’d also started reading The Golden Turkey Awards at the library that my uncle was in charge of, and in 1982, it was impossible to know when you could see some of the films in it. This movie, which was on HBO all the time, gave me a chance to see clips of them and discover that they were real.
Directors and executive producers Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo spent about five months researching and collecting movie clips from about 500 feature films. They then decided to expand their search beyond the 75 titles that the Paramount Pictures studio, the film project’s production house, had licensed for the documentary. However, this meant that it would never be released on home media, as licensing it would be too difficult.
Since I first saw this, I’ve learned that making fun of films isn’t the right way to enjoy them. But for a ten-year-old version of me, I got to see Ed Wood Jr. movies for the first time and couldn’t wait to see even more.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alien Nationwas on USA Up All Night on July 11, 1997.
Rockne O’Bannon created Farscape, seaQuest DSV, Defiance, Cult and the movie (and later TV series) Alien Nation. It was a spec script sent to Gale Anne Hurd, and she saw a lot of opportunity. What is the difference between other science fiction films? Herd explained, “We wanted the aliens to be more like a different ethnic race than like lizard people, … We didn’t want our audiences thinking, ‘Gee, look how different these aliens are.” Rather, after about five minutes, we wanted the audience to accept them as different from us, but not so different that no one would buy the storyline. We wanted the aliens to be characters–not creatures.”
In 1988, 300,000 enslaved aliens known as Newcomerslandedd in the Mojave Desert. Within three years, they’re settled in Los Angeles and some, like Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), become cops. His partner, Detective Matthew Sykes (James Caan) wants nothing to do with him, as he doesn’t trust the aliens once his partner is shot and killed in a robbery by several of them.
A case involving the wealthy newcomer businessman William Harcourt (Terence Stamp) and his henchman, Rudyard Kipling (Kevyn Major Howard, brings them together. There’s also a drug called Jabroka that can transform Newcomers into an even more dangerous form, and keeping it off the streets could be the difference between the two races existing as one.
This led to a 22-episode TV show, five TV movies, comic books and novels, all of which advanced the story.
Director Graham Baker also directed the last Omen movie.
You know who didn’t like this movie?
James Caan.
He told the AV Club, when asked about this movie:
James Caan: Why the f****…Why would you bring up that?
Will Harris: Many people actually like the film. I do, for one.
Caan: Yeah, well, I don’t know. I don’t have too many…I mean, I loved Mandy Patinkin. Mandy was a riot. But…I don’t know. It was a lot of silly stuff, creatively. And we had this English director whom I wasn’t really that fond of. I mean, nice guy, but…it was just one of those things where, you know, you don’t quit, you get through it. It certainly wasn’t one of…I wouldn’t write it down as one of my favorite movies. But it was pretty popular.
After Beverly Gareth is electrocuted in her bath, Cabot Cove is flooded with poison pen letters, which prove hard for the town to handle as Amos prepares to hand the reins over to a new sheriff, Harry Pierce. Jessica has her hands full with a travel writer who has come to stay with her for a time to put Cabot Cove on the map.
Season 2, Episode 10: Sticks and Stones (December 15, 1985)
Tonight on Murder, She Wrote…
Cabot Cove is flooded with negativity, which proves rough for the town to handle as Amos prepares to retire.
Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury, and were they in any exploitation movies?
John Astin is back as Harry Pierce, now going from real estate man to perhaps sheriff. This is the last of three appearances by him as this character; he also played Ross Hayley in season 1’s “Hooray for Homicide” and will return as Fritz Randall in season 11.
Spoiler, but this isn’t the last appearance of Tom Bosely as Sherrif Amos. He’d be on the show until season 4, when he left to be the lead on Father Dowling Mysteries.
Friedrich Hoffman is played by Paul Benedict, who you may know best as Harry Bentley from The Jeffersons. He was also in Mandingo, Smile, A Mighty Wind and This is Spinal Tap. He had acromegaly, the same birth defect as Andre the Giant and Rondo Hatton. Still, it was recognized by an endocrinologist whose intervention allowed him to live a much longer life.
George Knapp is played by Joseph Campanella, the voice actor behind the cartoon version of Spider-Man’s enemy, The Lizard. He was also in tons of films like Dead Girls Don’t Tango, Body Chemistry, Hangar 18 and Earthbound.
Elvira Tree is Marsha Hunt, who was Joe’s mother in Johnny Got His Gun.
Edna is Evelyn Keyes, who was in everything from Gone With the Wind and The Seven Year Itch to Wicked Stepmother, A Return to Salem’s Lot and Hell’s Half Acre. She was married to Artie Shaw.
Nils Anderson is Denny Miller, who played Tarzan in Tarzan, the Ape Man (in 1959, not with Bo Derek) and had henchman roles on numerous TV shows.
Lila Norris is Betsey Palmer, and man, you probably know that I’m obsessed with her.
Michael Digby is played by Parker Stevenson, one of the Hardy Boys.
Adam Frobisher is Christopher Stone, who was in Cujo and The Howling. He was once married to Dee Wallace.
Dr. Seth Hazlitt is back, played by William Windom as always.
Bart Nelson is played by Howard Witt. He was Mr. Boogedy!
Smaller roles include Phillip Brown as Deputy Willard and background roles for Ceil Cabot, Ken Sasnsom, Bob Tzudiker, Garnett Smith, Kristy Syverson and Danny McCoy, Jr.
What happens?
Sheriff Amos has retired for all of a minute when a series of mean letters — ala Needful Things but three years before that came out, but they’re both ripping off the Agatha Christie story The Moving Finger — bring him back in to work with Jessica, as new lawman Harry Pierce is pretty much the worst. Everyone is losing their minds because of these letters, as evidenced by a lady named Edna, who thinks Jessica is sleeping with her husband, so she smacks her in the head.
These letters are being sent because a woman named Beverly planned for letters to be sent out when she dies, as she is convinced that she will be killed. She is — death in the bathtub, my favorite — and she’s not the last, as a suicide soon follows.
Who could have turned the town on itself? Why is Cabot Cove so mean?
Who did it?
In an amazing misdirect — and one I would hope was planned from his first appearance — Harry Pierce shows that he’s more than a bad real estate developer. He’s also a killer and someone who burned down his own buildings for insurance settlements. He even pulls a gun on Jessica and says that he was friends with her and Frank, but now she has to die.
Who made it?
This episode was directed by Seymour Robbie and written by Jackson Gillis, Linda Shank and Mark Giles.
Does Jessica get some?
She’s lucky she didn’t get killed.
Does Jessica dress up and act stupid?
This is a deadly serious episode, even if one woman thinks Jessica was in bed with her spouse.
Was it any good?
Yes! When I first saw this, Gomez Addams being the killer was a shock.
Any trivia?
This is the first time in the series that one person from Cabot Cove murders someone else from the town. Until now, it’s all been crimes involving outsiders.
Give me a reasonable quote:
Sheriff Amos Tupper: Well, one thing’s for sure. This has got accident written all over it. Frayed cord, bathroom door locked from the inside. Even Mrs. Fletcher couldn’t make a murder out of this one.
What’s next?
An archaeological dig, potentially the site of Coronado’s City of Gold, does not please everyone as a new corpse is discovered.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Awakening was on USA Up All Night on June 30, 1990.
Based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars — which was also filmed as an episode of Mystery and Imagination as “The Curse of the Mummy,” Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and the 90s movie Bram Stoker’s The Mummy — this movie places Matthew Corbeck (Charlton Heston), his pregnant wife Anne (Jill Townsend) and his assistant Jane Turner (Susannah York) in Egypt searching for the tomb of Queen Kara. One could argue that the most exploring Matthew is doing is between the thighs of Jane, but there you go.
When you see a sign that says “Do Not Approach the Nameless One Lest Your Soul Be Withered,” you may want to turn back. Nope, Matthew goes in hard — again, much like with his assistant — while his wife goes into labor. She’s dropped off at a hospital so he can get back to digging, and their stillborn child comes back to life once he unearths and opens a sarcophagus.
Eighteen years later and that daughter, Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist) is looking for her father, who is now married to Jane and still obsessed with the mummy that he found. It’s being destroyed by bacteria, so he gets it sent to England so that he can save it. Of course, the mummy queen wants to be reincarnated inside his daughter, who starts to believe that she really is Queen Kara.
Directed by Mike Newell (who went on to direct Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco) and written by Clive Exton, Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, The Awakening is a big dumb mess. It was recut by Monte Hellman after Newell lost final cut. The best thing I can say is that this was shot in Egypt with actual locations.
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